


Seen through a Glass Darkly

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Death, Duty, Family, Fealty, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Honor, Kindness, Loss, Peace, Politics, Promises, References to Suicide, Trust, faith - Freeform, references to death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 19:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15936674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Years apart, Gary mourns and comforts two kings.





	Seen through a Glass Darkly

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for discussion of death and references to suicide. Please exercise caution in reading if those topics might trigger you.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV). 

Seen through a Glass Darkly 

The Black God’s chapel was quiet as a tomb, and Gary shivered at the comparison. On the altar illuminated by a hundred flickering candles, Jon’s face was serene and untwisted by the stroke that had torn through him suddenly as a summer storm, claiming his life without warning. Jon’s passing had rattled him to the core even more than the deaths of his parents. Gary had expected and accepted—viewed it as the natural if morbid way of things under the sun—that his parents should die before him but he had always assumed that Jon, who had forever blazed with passion, would outlive him. 

Of the two of them, Jon had been the younger even if only by a year and also—Gary had no qualm being intellectually honest enough with himself to admit—the one more likely to look after his health. While much of Gary’s muscle had swelled into the fat that could accumulate so swiftly around the midsection when one’s greatest exploits were researching policy matters and debating pivotal political issues, Jon had managed to maintain much of his fitness up until the moment of his stroke. 

Seeming as numb by the abruptness of Jon’s undoing as anyone else, Duke Baird—what was left of his hair gray as thunderclouds from witnessing too much death—had said that a stroke could kill anyone at any time. Privately Gary supposed that Jon must have inherited more of Aunt Lianne’s frailty than he had thought. Hearts were a Naxen weakness, not that Gary particularly cared to dwell on that fact at his age…

To take his mind off gloomy contemplations of his own mortality, he stared around the chapel. Tonight Jon’s family paid their respects to him in the more intimate chapel while tomorrow he would be mourned in state at the grand Black God’s temple in Corus and then finally laid to rest with pomp and circumstance in the Conte crypts. 

Jon, Gary knew in his aching bones, would be proud of the family assembled in his honor—of the many offspring he had made with Thayet, the strong branches that had expanded a once dangerously small family tree that risked blowing over in any gust of wind. 

Liam stood beside his father’s mahogany coffin, his fist planted upon his sword hilt as if to serve as an honor guard as Jon’s spirit traveled to the Peaceful Realms. Jasson sat in a pew, talking in a hushed voice with his mother, no doubt lost in memories of Jon. Vania and Lianne hugged one another tightly, weeping into each other’s shoulders instead of handkerchiefs. Kalasin—wed to distant Carthak that she had given an heir—wasn’t present though she had sent long letters and gifts of condolence by fastest ship. Roald knelt in the front pew of the chapel with Shinko’s fingers laced with his as his three daughters—Lianokami, Kalakami, and Hanakami—lit incense in Jon’s honor. 

Jon, Gary remembered with a pang, had always hated incense that caused him to cough like a cat hacking up a hairball. He had loved fresh smells that brought cherries to his cheeks and stars to his eyes. The smell of grass as they raced through it barefoot as boys had invigorated him. The smell of water when they clung to a rope slung over a branch overlooking the Olorum, swung out over the water, and then plopped like pebbles into it before swimming to shore had made him laugh. The tang of salt as he waded in waves along the ragged coast of the Emerald Ocean had made him smile with every ebb and flow. The smell of leaves when they jumped into a pile had made him roll around as ecstatically as a puppy. The sharp scent of mistletoe had made him thrill in celebrating Midwinter by dumping it onto the heads of unsuspecting victims. 

Gary hoped that if the Peaceful Realms as the priests of the Black Gods insisted to any who would listen were indeed a perfect mirror of everything pleasant in the Mortal Realms that there would be grass for Jon to run through, rivers for him to fall into, waves for him to dance in, leaves for him to leap in, and mistletoe for his merriest pranks. He shouldn’t have to be dignified and solemn in the Peaceful Realms as he had been forced to be in life after his father’s death. He should be allowed to remain forever young—forever a blissful boy—there. That was how Gary would imagine him: as pure as he had been before he had known loss and grief. 

“You should talk to Roald.” Cythera’s gentle elbow nudged Gary out of his musings on Jon’s life and death. “I think the only reason he ever rose out of his kneeling was so the rest of us could sit or stand as we pleased.” 

Cythera, Gary figured, was probably correct in this assessment. Roald had risen from his kneeling only once since they had entered the chapel hours ago. That had released everybody else from the obligation of remaining kneeling. The rest of the time Roald had knelt whether in prayer for his father’s soul or appeal for guidance from gods who too often felt unapproachable and unfathomable to Gary. Only Shinko who must have spent half her childhood kneeling in the Yamani Islands joined her husband in his endless kneeling. 

“I wouldn’t want to interrupt his mourning, dear.” Gary would never stop loving his godsson but there was no denying that Roald was a serious person, not the sort whose contemplations one wished to intrude upon especially since he had always been more inclined to clutch his cards against his chest rather than confide in others. Roald wasn’t merely more reserved than his parents. He was also more inscrutable than them, and it hadn’t taken Gary long to recognize that was how Roald preferred it to be. 

“His father is dead.” Cythera’s voice was no more than a murmur in his ear. It was hard to speak of Jon’s death in anything but a whisper. “You’re the closest man he has to a father now—his godsfather.” 

Gary wondered if Roald might regard Lord Imrah, his former knightmaster and erstwhile advisor, as more of a father figure, but, not being family, Lord Imrah wasn’t in attendance at this vigil, which left the difficult duty of consolation to Gary. As he rose from the pew where he had been sitting with Cythera, Gary recalled the moment when Jon had named him Roald’s godsfather. 

( “I’m making you godsfather to my son.” Jon hadn’t asked if Gary wished to have this immense honor that was also a grave responsibility in the eyes of gods and mortals. “If I should die”—

“You’re too young to worry about dying, Jon.” Gary interrupted, thinking that Jon had been too prone to ruminating on his mortality since his parents had died and the catastrophe that had been Coronation Day had only exacerbated that grim tendency. “You’ve many years left in you yet, and you’ll see your son grow into manhood.” 

“I pray that it will be so.” Jon was undeterred, determined as he was dark. “If I don’t you must serve as father to my son, bringing him up—teaching him and disciplining him—as if he were your own. Thayet would be a mother to him but you must be father to him if I can’t be.” 

“It would be my honor and duty as godsfather.” Gary’s mouth felt dry as cracked parchment as he sipped at his white wine. “You can trust me to always do my duty by you and your son, Jon.” 

“I know that.” Jon’s gaze locked on Gary’s, somber and unbreakable as an oath. “I love Thayet as I never have another woman, and I trust you as I would a brother.” 

In response, Gary could only offer his loyalty. “I would never betray your trust or your son’s.” ) 

There had, it occurred to Gary now, been no time limit placed upon his devotion or his vow to be a father to Roald if Jon should die before him. As he approached Roald, footsteps echoing in the silent chapel, he was swallowed in a memory of how he had once walked on shaking knees to the front of this shame chapel to support Jon after Uncle Roald’s hunting accident that wasn’t truly an accident. 

(The chapel had been almost empty and every breath seemed to resound too loudly off the harsh, cold floor. The stained glass windows cast an eerie effervescence over Uncle Roald’s coffin which was closed because his final fall had mangled his body too much to permit a stately viewing. Death seemed to lurk in the shadow of every cowled statue of the Black God. 

Only he, his parents, and Jon were present to pray for the departed king’s soul. Aunt Lianne was weeks in her tomb, and Gary could envision her waiting to welcome her husband to the Peaceful Realms with a beam bright as sun rays on her face. She would be radiant as the sun, Gary tried to believe, without her ill health to prevent her from enjoying everything to the fullest, and, in death, her trust—her unshakeable faith that others were as kind as her—could never be disappointed by a snake like Roger biting at her heels. As to Roger, Gary was vindictively glad that Jon, icy and commanding, had given the resurrected and reinstated Duke of Conte to understand that he was unwelcome as a grave robber at this family affair. 

Jon didn’t look so fierce now. He was crumbled in on himself in the pew before Gary, head pressed against his palm as if he could divine answers to death’s mysteries written in his lifelines. Gary was used to sitting behind Gary at religious events. In his youth his habit had been to amuse himself by tugging teasingly at Jon’s hair and clothes. Whenever Jon spun around in an attempt to catch him, he would stare straight ahead and tuck his smirk inside. His mother, a most redoubtable woman not to be trifled with, would slap at his wrist or yank on his earlobe when she noticed him engaged in such mischief, but when he rose now because he couldn’t bear to see Jon alone in his agony a heartbeat longer, she slid back against the pew to allow him to pass without comment or chiding. 

“It’s my fault he’s dead.” Jon sounded broken as Uncle Roald’s body as Gary slipped into the pew beside him. “I should’ve foreseen that he would do this and prevented him from doing it.” 

“Nobody—not you, not me, not Father—could’ve foreseen this or prevented it.” Gary tried to be reasonable even though nothing had made sense since Lord Thom had brought Roger back from the dead. “It was Uncle’s choice, and it wouldn’t have been a kindness to keep him chained to this life when he desperately wanted to move onto the next. Uncle valued kindness above all. I remember one time he told me that in the end only kindness was worth anything.” 

Gary remembered that although he had been only a boy when Uncle Roald had made this remark to him. Even as a lad, it had struck him as an odd thing for a king—no matter how benevolent—to express. It was certainly a sentiment that would never have left a Naxen’s lips. Loyalty could be cruel, duty was often unkind, and the Naxens were nothing if not loyal and dutiful to king and country. Naxens were bred from the cradle to believe that duty to the realm—unstinting faithfulness to the Crown—came before everything else. 

“Duty isn’t kind.” Jon gave voice to Gary’s thoughts as he lifted his head from his hands. “Father had a duty to his kingdom—to his people. He forgot it but I won’t. I’ll do my duty even in my grief.” 

Gary was too awed by Jon’s strength—his resilience in the face of staggering losses that would have crippled most young rulers—to speak, which was just as well because Jon, eyes softening with affection, went on, “I can do my duty because of your support, Gary. I don’t often say it but I always know it. I would be nothing without you.” 

“The realm would be nothing without you.” Discomfited by the praise, Gary was quick to return the compliment to his cousin. 

“Now it would be.” The truth in Jon’s gaze was raw and red-rimmed. “Before I die, I’ll make it so it won’t be. That’s my promise to you and to the kingdom.” 

Gary had answered with a half-bow that conveyed everything words couldn’t.) 

Kneeling beside Roald in the same pew where he had once comforted Jon, Gary was jolted out of his reflection by Roald addressing him in an undertone. “The priests say the gods will reply to us loudly and clearly if we’ll only humble ourselves and pray to them, Your Grace.” 

Being referred to by that title still startled Gary, still caused him to crane his neck in search of his late father whom he would forever think of as the Duke of Naxen. Recovering his wits, wishing that he was as adept at dispensing spiritual insight as he was political advice, he decided not to share the fact that whenever he tried to pray to the gods he only found a thousand unanswered questions buried deep inside him. He had given his second daughter, his beloved Jaquetta who had loved books more than boys, to the Goddess, after all, and watched her rise to lead her convent in Port Legann. At last he settled for saying, “Your father believed the gods communicated with him and even saved his life.”

The gods, he thought, might have touched Jon and Alanna, but they had never touched him. Perhaps he was too much of a skeptic for that. Maybe since he didn’t believe in miracles, miracles had never happened to him. 

“The gods have never seen fit to grant me such favors, I’m afraid.” Roald’s grin was wry. He shot Gary a sidelong glance that was all the warning he gave before switching the subject. “You were my father’s most trusted advisor. Would you be my Prime Minister as you were his?” 

“I’d be honored to serve as your Prime Minister until you find your own, one who shares your vision for the country as I did your father’s and who has more energy than I do now.” Gary hesitated and then continued, “Once you name my replacement, I would follow in my father’s footsteps and retire to Naxen except when you’ve need of my counsel. I wouldn’t want your Prime Minister to perceive me as an overbearing, interfering elder.” 

“Very well.” Roald nodded, and Gary had the impression that Roald might have already chosen his successor but asked him to remain at his post out of respect. Roald had ever been the embodiment of courtesy. “Then I’ll ask your daughter, the Lady Zenoby, to do me the honor of serving as my Prime Minister.” 

Gary felt a surge of almost blinding pride in his clever, diplomatically deft daughter. Somewhere in the Peaceful Realms, he was confident that Jon felt the same way about his oldest son and heir. 

“The first lady to serve as Prime Minister in all of Tortall’s illustrious history.” Gary smiled even though it hurt after so many days devoid of hope and joy. “That’s downright revolutionary. Your father would be proud.” 

“I hope so.” Roald’s tone was dry but there was a twinkle of a joke in his eyes. “I’m not trying to be revolutionary, though. I’m trying to appoint the best person possible to the post and to remain true to the noble tradition of a Naxen Prime Minister.” 

“Your father would still be proud of you.” Gary remembered how often Jon would comment that his children were his legacies. “He was proud of all his children, you know.” 

Some of the tension tied in Roald’s forehead eased—every son, Gary thought, longed to hear that his father was proud of him—and he inclined his head toward the altar where his father lay. “I’ll continue to make him proud. I’ll honor his legacy even as I forge my own path.” 

That, Gary had no doubt, was exactly what Jon would have wanted to hear, what he would have hoped for the future of his heir and his country.


End file.
